This installment of our popular digital feature, Bill Torpy at Large, also appears on MyAJC.com. That’s where you’ll find new installments every Sunday, Monday and Thursday.

Beverly Hall, the accused ringleader of a cheating scandal that rocked Atlanta’s schools, is not in court.

But Shani Robinson, an alleged bit player in the sordid drama, is there. Monday, Robinson stood impassively six feet in front of the jury as her attorney, Annette Greene, presented her opening statement, in which she hinted that the case is a travesty of justice.

That Robinson is four months pregnant was assuredly not lost on the jurors. In April, 2009, Robinson was 24, a Teach for America teacher leading a first grade class, when she allegedly changed answers on students’ tests. She faces racketeering charges as an alleged member of criminal enterprise that prosecutors say was run by Hall during her tenure as Atlanta superintendent.

Greene said her client was told to erase stray marks. She said she was also told that first and second graders’ scores didn’t count in the testing process.

After Monday’s court session, Greene told me she asked her client to step forward from the rows of defendant tables so that jurors “can see she is not Beverly Hall. She is someone beyond a booking photo. This was her second year of teaching; she was no veteran teacher.”

The scene provided a poignant moment in the first day of the long-awaited Atlanta Public Schools cheating trial. It’s an event more than five years in the making; that’s how long has passed since the AJC first started poking around the magically improved test scores that Hall & Co. were peddling to the public.

Hall was not there in Fulton County Court because she is desperately ill with cancer. So the Beverly Hall Conspiracy Trial started without her. There was somewhat of a deflated feeling in the courtroom — sort of like going to see a star in a Broadway play but instead getting stuck with the stand-in.

But as Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard knows, the show must go on.

And what a show it is. The trial actually started Aug. 11 with jury selection and is scheduled to grind on and on. In fact, it will take longer than a normal school semester and may be as educational.

There are just 12 defendants left of the 35 who were indicted. These dozen are the educators who declined offers to plead guilty in exchange for probation. They sit with their attorneys in six rows of tables that make the defense side of the room resemble a lecture hall.

Robinson, who was a high school freshman in DeKalb County when Hall arrived in Atlanta 1999, did not plead guilty. “She’s young, and that kind of record follows you,” Greene said. “If she went to get another job she’d have to say she was guilty.”

The APS cheating story is old hat by now to just about anyone in Atlanta. Hall arrived to town highly touted, the one person who could salvage the troubled urban school system. Only she could close the “achievement gap” suffered by students on the fringe, who make up a substantial portion of the district.

A decade later, Hall was named National Superintendent of the Year for the “Atlanta Miracle,” a turnaround in which the city’s poor kids became adept readers and budding mathematicians. Because of Hall, their future looked brighter.

Of course, many of those gains were an illusion, the work of No. 2 pencil erasers and, as prosecutor Fani Willis said, the offspring of “a culture of fear and intimidation.” And lying, lots of lying.

Willis noted that the cheating at Dunbar Elementary, where Robinson worked, was so brazen that the odds of the wrong-to-right-answer erasures being legit were more than a “quadrillion to one.” That’s a number with 15 zeroes, she explained.

The jurors settling into their chairs for the long haul are bound to wonder about Hall. She’s almost certain to remain omnipresent in the trial, with both prosecutors and defense attorneys invoking her name. It’s not clear what, if anything jurors will be told about her absence, although several of them said while being picked that they are aware she is sick.

Bob Wilson, the bulldog-like former DeKalb County D.A. who helped lead an investigative team that uncovered much of the cheating, said “the empty chair is an elephant in the room.”

Attorneys I’ve talked to say that might hurt the prosecution, perhaps making jurors more sympathetic to some of the other defendants.

“There’s going to be a level of sympathy for people down the line; I’ve felt it,” said Wilson, who interviewed dozens of teachers and administrators during the investigation in 2010 and 2011. “People were placed in a position of either yielding to the pressure (and cheating) or facing the prospect of losing their job.

“Most people don’t have a pocket full of money,” he added. “This pressure filtered down from the top. I think a jury won’t be immune to that.”

But, Wilson added, three area superintendents and a principal are among the defendants. “They were the captains of the ship,” he said. People in those ranks could have stood up to the pressure or moved on, he said.

“What about the students who were screwed in the process?” Wilson said. He meant the students who, because of fake test results, were not deemed to be in need of extra teaching services and federal funding. “We have children whose struggle in life will be greater than it should have been. Those are the forgotten people.”